Atlanta Braves Care Package from a Cardinals Fan?

If it's been quite here on the blog it's because I've been moving. I never thought seriously about moving until this summer when the wife and kids started to apply some real pressure. I was a lot of work. I knew I had a lot of stuff, but until you have to put your hands on each and every item you have and pack it you don't really know how much stuff you have!

We got moved into the new home in early August and began to unpack. My new "hobby room" or "man cave" if you will was also the staging area for the movers...so it's taken some time to dig through all the boxes and try to find a new home for many of our things. Fast forward a few weeks and things are starting to come together. I've got a large built in bar in my new room and since I don't drink, I've decided to turn it into my desk for work. It'll also double nicely as a work space for my trading cards and toy photography (eventually). While I still have many boxes of misc. card stuff to unpack, the underside of the bar is making a great storage place for many of my card monster boxes and shoe box houses I use for my card collection.

While I'm still trying to find a home for everything, I got a rather large package the other week that I wasn't expecting. It was forwarded to my new address (thankfully) from the USPS as it was sent some time ago by one of my regular trading card break participants, Patrick W Ayers. Patrick has been grabbing his St. Louis Cardinals in my breaks for a good while now...at least when Kerry Biggs of Cards on Cards doesn't beat him to the punch), but he didn't mention anything to me about a package being en route. 

As you can see from the above image, the package was full of various Atlanta Braves gear. To be completely honest, I was glad that for a change someone didn't send me a box full of cards. While I'm always thankful for any type of gift sent to me, I still have so many 200 ct. boxes and larger full of cards I've been set that I've yet to catalog. To see a Homer Hanky, autographed baseball, a mini foam tomahawk and other items staring back at me was refreshing and fun.

While most of the package contained items other than cards, there were a few included. Across the top row were a few Dubuque autographed mascot cards of Rally and (now culturally insensitive) Homer the Brave. I believe these are some sort of food issued cards. If anyone can shed some light on these I'd greatly appreciate it.

The bottom row featured a chrome like sticker with the Braves logo and a Domino's Pizza card of Dale Murphy. I've never seen either of these so I was super happy to add them to the collection as I love odd ball stuff like this. I thought the sticker was something Panini released back in the day, but it is not.

Patrick must have known David Justice was my favorite Braves player as a kid because not only was there one of those 90's style card plaques, but also this Silver Star AuthenTicket. It's too bad the acrylic screw down slab its in was cracked because it looks great. The 90's era hologram card is awesome and reminds me of the old Denny's Grand Slam cards.

I've never messed around with much baseball memorabilia over my collecting years, but only because that was just another rabbit hole I didn't need to jump down. Included in the package was this encased autographed 1991 NL champions ball. I'm pretty sure the top signature is Braves "legend" Francisco Cabrera, but I can't quite make out the lower signature. Is that a "3B" underneath the signature? If you can make heads or tails of this, please let me know!

Call me silly, but I think my favorite item in the care package was this old touch tone Braves phone. I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with the phone, but it's way too cool in a retro way to not keep. I'm trying to keep the bar area of the room trading card themed so I'll probably find a good place on the wall to mount it.

There were a lot of other cool items in the box and I can't thank Patrick enough for his kindness. It's been weird to have been so distant from the trading card community over these last few months and it's people like Patrick and others I interact with on a regular basis that make this community so great. 

As I'm getting unpacked and my room somewhat settled, I am slowly getting back to business with hosting my "famous" Affordable Group Breaks again. We'll fire it up tomorrow night, then we'll see what happens. I don't think I can return to the same schedule as I was doing before, but I am working on the details. Until then, we'll catch everyone on the next post...